HOW I FIXED MY SLEEP

Until a few years ago, writes Michelle McShortall ,a good night’s sleep gave me a great sense of restoration. But then I began waking up feeling exhausted even after a full night’s sleep. I was also grinding my teeth. I realised that my go-to reboot remedy had slowly come undone.

To put it all into context, a few years before, I had suffered two herniated discs and as a result had switched from side sleeping to back sleeping. One morning my husband Mark mentioned that I had been snoring. I presumed he was describing an occasional light feminine purr. Women don’t really snore, do they?

Then another pattern began to emerge. Mark was waking earlier and earlier. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it had to do with my alleged snoring. So feeling a bit guilty, I decided to check it out.

The first eye-opener was the news, via the National Sleep Foundation in the US, that my snoring could be on the way to a fairly serious sleep disorder, sleep apnoea, a condition where your breathing repeatedly stops and starts during the night. If untreated it can lead to high blood pressure to heart disease and other health nasties.

I needed to find out if I was snoring. And of course, there’s an app to help. SnoreLab (snorelab.com) records and tracks snoring. It records four different grades, from Quiet to Light to Loud and what they call ‘Epic’. I plugged in my smartphone, activated the app and nodded off.

The next morning, my dashboard graph showed that I was summiting those Epic peaks enthusiastically. SnoreLab had literally caught me in the act.

I began to research ways to combat the problem. I tried Neti pots — where you rinse your sinus with salty

water — the Buteyko technique, which focuses on nose breathing and relaxation techniques, and oral exercises in case I had a flabby tongue.

I deduced I was a nocturnal mouth breather. Dr Mark Burhenne, author of The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox: How We Are Sleeping Our Way to Fatigue, Disease and

Unhappiness, became my guru. He explains that nasal breathing is important because of nitric oxide. You don’t want to miss out on this clever, colourless gas which, he says, improves memory and learning, regulates blood pressure, reduces inflammation, improves sleep quality, increases endurance and strength, and improves immune function. Twenty-five per cent of our nitric oxide comes via nose breathing. Mouth breathing leaves us short.

Grinding your teeth, which I had thought was stress related, is, says Burhenne, an instinctual response to reopen our airways and help us survive.

So what do you do about it? Happily Dr Burhenne offers a solution, one that can be found in every first aid kit and will cost you about 2c per night. Mouth taping. Every night before I go to sleep, I place a piece of microporous surgical tape (Micropore) over my lips and tape my mouth shut. This forces me to breathe through my nose during the night and has opened up my nasal airways in a way I would not have believed possible.

Now I wake refreshed and restored. I feel my memory and concentration has improved and my SnoreLab score shows my snoring has dropped dramatically. For me, mouth taping is the all-time super sleep hack.

Of course, it does look strange. But hey, it’s win win all round, and I think my sleep partner would vouch for that.

Waking in the middle of the night? Check your carb intake, especially for fast-releasing pastas, breads and pastries. “It can also disrupt sleep,” says Dr Briffa, “and is a major cause of why people wake in the middle of the night.”